It's the old craftsmen vs industry issue, Andrew comes from the craftsman tradition that prefers all other people developing to also be proud craftsmen.

What Java, JS, Python and C# all did to conquer the industry from a C++ dominance was to provide safety harnesses for less "perfectionist" workers to fumble around without causing a mess, to write C and C++ in an increasingly hostile world we realized you needed a lot of craftsmanship, the performance benefits outdid and kept the latter languages relevant for a long while.

Still, the performance/predictability penalty didn't give way so Rust (and Swift) came into play. They don't have as many unpredictable performance characteristics as the previously "safe" GC languages but still provided more or less the same guarantees (in some ways perhaps even better for Rust).

The brilliance of the Rust ideas did start a bit of a cambrian explosion of languages in that niche, most of them however targeting a bit more of a craftsman position than Rust (that came out of distinct industry needs).

The problem as the article illustrates, in car terms.

If Java,JS,etc are mostly "regular safe cars" and C/C++ a two wheel motorcycle.

Rust is perhaps a rally car (fast but still a car so occupants inside are well protected) whilst Zig really is a quadbike or open wheel cart, not as unsafe as a two wheel bike since you won't slide for the smallest oil/ice patch but flipping over is still dangerous as hell.

And that takes us to the crux, so many developers who love the craft and perfection (and don't live under- or perhaps care of- financial constraints) think that "good careful" developers is all that's needed and don't see dangerous language designs as a problem.

I'm an older developer, and given that I can write "good careful code", but 90% of the time it's also a matter of time and financial constraints so I wouldn't trust mine (or anyone elses for that matter) code written under those "industry" conditions.

I think Zig has a lot of nice perks, but it was obvious from day 1 that it's very much for people that love their hacking freedom over writing code for todays hostile world.

All I’ve seen is there is literally no programmer smart and careful enough to never create a use after free or out of bounds read in a sufficiently complex codebase.

The state of computer security has moved on from the old model of just patching bugs when you find them. To now where we need to systematically prevent them from happening to begin with.

That was a pretty good car analogy. Thank you.

Edit to add: I'm unsure where assembly would sit in this analogy. Skateboard? Monocycle? Perhaps ice skates.